Sunday, July 29, 2007

Harper has called the first two of seven pending by-elections for September 17. The one that matters is in Outremont. It is the first electoral test of Stéphane Dion, who has selected Jocelyn Coulon, an academic and media commentator similar in profile to Dion himself, as the Liberal candidate. However, he faces a serious challenge from the NDP.

The NDP? In Quebec? Surely you jest TC.

In fact the NDP is running its strongest by-election candidate in Quebec since Phil Edmonston won the 1990 Chambly by-election. Thomas Mulcair was Jean Charest's environment minister but split with Charest over the privatization of provincial park land. Mulcair did not represent Outremont provincially, but he is well known and highly regarded in Quebec, and is already being taken seriously as a candidate by the Quebec media.

Going in to the campaign I have estimated an Outremont result based on the three recent national opinion surveys' Quebec sub-samples.

Here are the numbers: Liberal 30%, NDP 24%, BQ 23% and the PCs 12%.

This estimate is based on adjusting the results of the last election based on the shifts measured by the polls. At the time of the last election the Liberal candidate was Jean Lapierre and the NDP candidate was Léo-Paul Lauzon. Simply in terms of prior public knowledge and reputation, this gives an early advantage to the NDP.

The NDP's other advantage is that as the party voicing the strongest opposition to Canada's participation in the war in Afghanistan, they would benefit if it becomes the key by-election issue. Quebec has not been fertile ground for the NDP in the past but if Mulcair can make the byelection a referendum on the war more or less to the exclusion of other considerations, he really does have the potential to win. In the latest Strategic Counsel poll 75% of Quebec respondents were opposed to sending troops there.

There was a classic failure of leadership here this week: a vote by Toronto's city council not to impose taxes on land transfers and car registrations. It's a textbook case, for study by future eras and civilizations.

Take as background an example of actual leadership. Here are the words of London Mayor Ken Livingstone, in 2000, shortly before his re-election after years of attacks on himself and his city, by both Thatcher Tories and Blair Labourites. “The great shining lie of British politics is that you can have good public services without putting up taxes.” He uses the hard word, lie; he states the worthy goal, good public services, instead of shabby ones; and he portrays the route to it – more taxes – as a challenge instead of something to apologize for. Here's the response, described by a reporter: “The crack of palm on palm was thunderous.”

No guts, no glory.

It is this kind of truth-telling, along with the prize when it works, that Toronto Mayor David Miller avoided. His main argument for adding taxes, reportedly, was that other big cities do it too. That's apologetic and imitative.

I think Salutin is right but the origins of this crisis do matter, and in that respect Salutin gives Mike Harris a free pass he doesn't deserve.

Miller could have done a better job of explaining the city's fiscal predicament. Council could have done a better job of finding savings at city hall.

But the root cause of the municipal budget crunch is the tax relief Harris doled out a decade ago. "We are giving back to Ontarians more of their hard-earned money," he reminded voters regularly.

For most Ontarians, the benefits of those tax cuts are a receding memory.

The costs will go on and on.

My only complaint about this is that Goar (probably quite unconsciously) uses the neoconservative phrase "tax relief", which is a biased construction deliberately devised to tilt public debate on this issue. The term itself is part of Livingstone's "great shining lie".